Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [79]
“Where are you from?” I asked when I got a chance.
“Tete.”
“Tete?”
“Ja. I’ve been stuck there for two fucking days.”
“No, I don’t mean where have you just come from today. I mean, where are you from originally?”
St. Medard eyed me levelly for a moment over the top of his cigarette and then asked, “You’re not one of those nosy journalist types, are you?”
“No,” I lied.
St. Medard looked out at the lake and cleared his throat uneasily. He didn’t say anything else until Mapenga finally arrived with the beers, then said, “Fuck you very much,” and swallowed the beer in a few thirsty gulps. He bit the lid off another and gulped that down too. “Ah,” he said when he had finished, “that’s better.”
Two days before, St. Medard had been in a car accident in which four people had been killed. “But I think the death toll is rising,” he said, almost choking on a laugh and turning a pale reptilian color that I associate more with geckos than humans.
“What happened?” asked K.
The beer had relaxed St. Medard’s tongue. He spoke more easily now. Or perhaps he felt safer talking to K, who was obviously from the same tribe as he was. “Beyond Tete there,” he said, addressing himself to the men, “a truck cut the corner and was coming straight for me, on my side of the road. I couldn’t get any farther over or I would have been over the cliff, you know. He was going to come straight up the bonnet. I thought, No. Cheerio, chaps. This is it, hey. Curtains for St. Medard.
“But instead of hitting me, he came at me sideways, clipped the side of my cab, then he does this”—St. Medard demonstrated the driver of the other vehicle wrestling the steering wheel violently from one side to the other—“and he flipped the thing arse over tit.” St. Medard flicked his cigarette off the pavilion wall and lit another one. “Then his vehicle rolls—squashed. My cab has a bloody face job. But his pickup hits an anthill on its way over, and it’s an old hill that’s been taken over by a nest of bees. Then the sports began! Ha! Let the games begin! I didn’t get out of the cab. Well, I got out and I got horned about thirty times in fifty seconds. I didn’t even look at the damage on the cab. I shot back in and shut the windows.”
St. Medard shook his head. “These ous from the other vehicle—there must have been about thirty of them sitting in the back when the thing rolled over—were deezering. I mean, the lame and injured—forget about the pain and the dying—when the bees started, everyone was running. Ha! Ha! The lame shall walk, the dead shall rise again—that’s what it was like.
“Some of those ous were covered. When those bees smelled blood they must have thought, No, there’s a serious problem here. I’ve never seen it like that. It must have been a size colony because you’ve got thirty or forty munts running in all directions, all covered with bees, hollering.” St. Medard took off across the pavilion to demonstrate, lifting his knees in the high step, swiping his ears, and roaring. The exercise left him breathless and a bit shaky, so he lit another cigarette. “Then they tried to get in the cab with me! I was slapping hard, hey. I was shouting, ‘You’re not getting anywhere near me covered with bees.’
“I was stuck in the cab for five hours with the window up. I couldn’t get out to fix the damage because of the bees. In this heat, hey. It makes a chap lonely for a beer. And I think I killed Connor’s foreman—I was giving him a lift into town when the crash happened and ay, he didn’t look too lively when I dropped him off at the hospital, poor ou. Connor isn’t going to be very pleased with me.”
Mapenga disappeared again to check on supper. I asked St. Medard how long he had been in Mozambique. His manner suddenly became shifty and imprecise again, as if he hoped that by swallowing his words into his enormous ginger-gray beard, he could scramble his answers. “Thirty years,” he told me.
“Thirty years?